More is Not Always Better… But it Usually Is

 

     A couple of posts ago, in my essay on stealing good ideas, I mentioned a quote I stole (and have often used) from the strength coach Nick Horton: “More is not always better, but it usually is.”  In this essay, I want to give you some practical ways to apply this truth to your training.

     It has been generally asserted over the years—in bodybuilding magazines and now in blogs and in YouTube videos, or other social media sites—that the key to gaining muscle or strength is through “progressive overload” and that the best way to do that is by either increasing reps or by increasing the weight (but keeping the reps the same), but that one shouldn’t just add sets or exercises.  But I don’t believe that to be the best option for the majority of lifters.  I actually think it’s good to add extra sets, exercises, and, yes, even entire workouts, on a consistent if not regular basis.  In fact, I think this is the key to making steady progress.  But it needs to be done systematically.

     How much and how often—and the exact means of doing this—will depend upon your level of strength, muscle mass, and your genetic makeup.  Now, to be honest, I almost didn’t write this essay because many lifters are not capable of making the appropriate changes in this regard on their own, and, in fact, need a good strength coach/trainer to decide what the lifter needs to add and how much.  But, if you’re honest with yourself, then you can use this essay as a sort of template for how to make the appropriate changes.

     First, if you’re new to lifting—or if you don’t have an appreciable combination of strength and muscle mass no matter how long you’ve been “training”—then I always recommend doing a 2 or 3-days-per-week full-body program.  And, to be honest, 2-days-per-week is probably best for the vast majority of lifters.  So, if you’re just starting out on a real strength, power, and mass program, you should use something that looks like this:

Monday

• Squats: 3 to 5 sets of 5 reps

• Bench Presses: 3 to 5 sets of 5 reps

• Power Cleans: 3 to 5 sets of 5 reps

• Barbell Curls: 3 to 5 sets of 5 reps

• Some form of loaded carries (farmer’s walks, sandbag carries, etc.): 1 or 2 hard sets for a certain distance, or simply 1 set done for as far as one can walk.

Thursday

• Squats: 3 to 5 sets of 5 reps

• Barbell Overhead Presses: 3 to 5 sets of 5 reps

• Deadlifts (sumo, conventional, or deficit): 3 to 5 sets of 5 reps

• Weighted Dips: 3 to 5 sets of 5 reps

• A loaded carry different from Monday’s workout, so if you did farmer’s walks on Monday, do sandbag carries here, or vice versa.

     After 4 to 6 weeks of the above, add an extra workout.  Now you should go to a 3-days-per-week schedule, training, say, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or something comparable.  At this point, make the middle workout of the week a “light” workout, by training in a similar manner to the other two days, but do about half the workload on this day.  And after several weeks of that, it would be time to do a Bill Starr-style heavy-light-medium program.

     You can now stick with a 3-days-per-week full-body workout for years if you wanted, and simply, slowly increase the amount of work you do at each session.  Let’s look at what (around) a year of training might look like utilizing full-body workouts as you progress toward more and more work.

     Here is what a Starr-style H-L-M program should look like when first utilized:

Heavy Day:

Squats – 5 sets of 5 reps

Bench presses – 5 sets of 5 reps

Deadlifts – 5 sets of 5 reps

Barbell Curls – 3 sets of 8 reps

Ab work

Light Day:

Squats – 5 sets of 5 reps

Overhead Presses – 5 sets of 5 reps

Good Mornings – 5 sets of 5 reps

Ab Work

Medium Day:

Squats – 5 sets of 5 reps

Incline Bench Presses – 5 sets of 5 reps

Power Cleans – 5 sets of 5 reps

Dumbbell Curls – 3 sets of 12 reps

Ab work

     After a few months of training, and assuming significant gains in strength have occurred, the program should look something such as the following:

Heavy Day:

Squats – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Bench presses – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Deadlifts – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Barbell Curls – 5 sets of 8 reps

Ab work

Light Day:

Squats – 5 sets of 5 reps

Overhead Presses – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Good Mornings – 5 sets of 5 reps

Ab Work

Medium Day:

Squats – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Incline Bench Presses – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Power Cleans – 8 sets of 5 reps

Dumbbell Curls – 5 sets of 12 reps

Ab work

     And, once again, after a few more months of training, the template should look something such as this:

Heavy Day:

Squats – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Walking lunges – 4 sets of 10 reps

Bench presses – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Weighted Dips – 4 sets of 8 reps

Deadlifts – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Barbell Curls – 5 sets of 8 reps

Ab work

Light Day:

Squats – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Overhead Presses – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Good Mornings – 5 sets of 5 reps

Ab Work

Medium Day:

Squats – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Front Squats – 4 sets of 10 reps

Incline Bench Presses – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Flat Dumbbell Bench Presses – 4 sets of 8 reps

Power Cleans – 8 sets of 5 reps

Dumbbell Curls – 5 sets of 12 reps

Ab work

     At this point, you would be pushing the limit, probably, of how much work you should be doing at each session—although I have, at times, recommended even more work than that for advanced lifters using a full-body program.  It’s at this point that you could start utilizing a split workout, but that’s actually not what Starr would have recommended.  He had lifters, once they were using a workload similar to the last example above, add another light day to the mix.  He believed this was the best way to increase work capacity, and, yes, to add more muscle, not to mention strength to one’s lifts.  In Starr’s method, if you are training Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on a heavy, light, medium rotation, you simply add another light day on Tuesday.  This session would be a little lighter than the Wednesday light workout, and, in that regard, be more of an “active recovery” session.

     In my powerlifting career, at one point, I was using Starr’s methods, replete with an extra light workout, but decided to switch to an even more voluminous workout method: Sheiko powerlifting.  It was really at this time in my training life when I discovered just how much work a lifter could utilize–and actually thrive on!  This isn’t the essay to really get into the details of Sheiko (I’ve written about it elsewhere on the blog), but suffice it to say that it involves two days of heavy squat training each week, two days of heavy deadlift training each week (performed on separate days from the two squat workouts, so that’s 4 days weekly of high-volume lower body training), and 4 days weekly of bench pressing.  I thought it was, to be totally and completely honest, an absolutely insane training schedule when I first read about it, and still thought it was insane when I first attempted it.  But then, within 6 months to a year of using it consistently, I was squatting and deadlifting 3 and a ½ times by bodyweight… and I stopped complaining about “too much” work or “overtraining.”

     A few years after I had stopped competing in powerlifting (due to all the injuries over the years), I decided to use a program similar to one that the late Anthony Ditillo had written about when describing fellow lifter Dezso Ban’s training.  According to Ditillo, here is what Ban’s training program looked like:

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: Legs and Shoulders

 - Back Squat

 - Front Squat

  - Lunges

On all of these, perform 8-10 sets of 5 repetitions, 5 x 5 with the heaviest weight. 

 - Standing Press

10 sets of 3s and 5s working up to a heavy weight. 

 - Bench Press

8 sets of 5 working up to a heavy weight. 

 - Roman Chair Work

6 sets of 5s working up to a heavy weight. 

Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday: “Pull” Day

 - Power Clean

 - High Pull

 - Stiff Legged Deadlift

On all of these, do 10 sets of 3s and 5s.

     I tried the above (what can probably be best described as) “madness” when I was around 40 years old, at an age a lot of so-called experts would probably call “too old” to even attempt that kind of workout.  The result?  Well, that can be seen on the cover of my Ultimate Strength book:

     Now, it must be said that I didn’t just “jump” into that sort of training immediately.  It took time working up to that much volume, or something approaching it, at each workout session.  I had already been doing an “easy strength” method before that, and just started adding sets and, at one point, exercises until I was eventually doing roughly the same amount of work that Ditillo had written about in regards to Ban.

     If you want to work up to using that same sort of workload, then you have a couple of options.  You can do exactly what I did; start off with an “easy strength” method—Dan John’s “40-day workout” or my “30 rep program” are the correct answers to what to use—and slowly add sets and exercises until you reach the point that you’re capable of handling a Ban-inspired program.  Or you can start off with a workout similar to one of Ban’s training days, but train on a one-on, one-off, or a 2-on, 2-off program, and, as you adjust to the volume, begin to slowly add extra days.

     I realize that, so far, I’ve only mentioned programs that are geared primarily toward strength and power (although they can also be good for hypertrophy, so they’re not “pure” strength routines).  What if you’re following a more “bodybuilding-centric” program?  Is more still better?  Yes.  It is.

     No matter what kind of training that you’re doing, and no matter your goals, more is better.  Until it’s not.  Let’s unpack this a little.

     I believe that one of the best methods for continual progress—and it doesn’t matter if it’s a multi-bodypart split bodybuilding program or a “basic” full-body Bill Starr-inspired program, or, hell, even a HIT-style program (although the devoted “HIT Jedi” would hate this suggestion)—is to add more work each week over a 3 or 4-week training block, then deload for a week, then repeat.  As you do this over the weeks and months, you will find that even your “light” weeks are eventually heavier and harder than your initial “heavy” weeks of training.  So a 4-week training block might look something like this:

Week One: light - Use a little less overall workload than what you would typically utilize during a week of training.

Week Two: medium - Use a little more overall workload than your typical week of training.

Week Three: heavy and hard - On the third week of training, train essentially all out.  Add some extra sets of each movement, and even an extra exercise or two.

Week Four: active recovery - On the 4th week, deload.  Use a total workload this week that is significantly lighter than Week One.  On occasion, after a few 4-week training blocks back-to-back, take this week off completely.

     

     In a future essay, I will outline how to consistently increase the workload while also adding in some constant variety needed for continual progress.  Until then, train heavy and hard.  And don’t forget to do more work, because that’s almost always your best option.